


Loyalty

by linguamortua



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, HYDRA Husbands, Hydra (Marvel), Jack Rollins Is A Grumpy Old Man, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, SHIELD, SHIELD: actually kind of evil, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 14:32:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4709477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>God damn, you rookies. Always wanting to hear the old war stories. Look, haven't you got anything better to-- oh, beer, good lad. Just put it right there on the chair. Okay, fine, one story. Did I ever tell you about the time I narrowly escaped execution in a SHIELD cell...?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loyalty

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [chalk-baphomet](http://chalk-baphomet.tumblr.com/) for a speedy read-through!

Yeah, what do you want? I’m busy. Drinking a beer is busy. Shouldn’t you rookies be at the range? Adams, your rifle skills need a hell of a lot more work. You can stop snickering, Lin, you shoot like a fucking drunk. Oh, you want a bedtime story? Sure, okay. Come sit down by Uncle Jack. All right, here we go.  

I’m no shrinking violet but look, this is the fuckin’ truth, just for you: taking a punch to the face hurts like a bitch. Forget what you see in the movies, forget what it’s like in the gym: when it’s for real, that shit stings. Hitting a guy bare-knuckled’s just the same. Burns across your knuckles like stubbing a toe in the middle of the night. You play it cool, ‘cause your buddies are watching, but don’t trust anyone who tells you they walked away from a fight without a scratch. Even if you win, you gotta pay the price. Like jerking off with your left hand for a week. Why am I telling you this? Well, a month after we royally fucked ourselves in DC, I had myself a real good opportunity to study getting beaten up.

Wanna know what sucks more than a fair fight? Taking a beating from guys you used to work with when they’ve got you tied to a chair. Christ. Those SHIELD assholes know how to hold a grudge. To their credit, they didn’t have me quietly murdered in medical, pillow over the face or whatever. No, their docs really fixed me up great – pins in my left leg, shrapnel removed from my gut and monitoring of a nice little concussion all taken care of, courtesy of the US government. Uncle Sam even sent me off to rehab so I can get around without a limp. Anyway, from there it was back to the Triskelion, or what was left of it, and I got a six-by-eight all to myself.

Better than being dead, but not by a whole lot.

They hauled me out of my box after a week of stewing in my own juices. Figured that boredom and bad food and petty intimidation tactics would do the job for them. Which they didn’t, and if you boys make it through training without shooting yourselves in the eye, that shit won’t work on you either. I didn’t know what time of day it was, what day of the week it was. I lost some time in medical, so I reckoned it had been about a month since the helicarriers went down into the Potomac.  I asked when they came to collect me, but they wouldn’t tell. Here’s a tip from me to you: you get captured, don’t ever ask ‘em a question more than once. Shows you want an answer too much.

SHIELD does shit by the book, so they started off real easy. Name, rank, clearance, which was goddamn hilarious when half those idiots worked with me for over a decade. I knew most of their tricks anyway. They weren’t real clear right away what they wanted; they were just trying to get warmed up, get the ball rolling. Calibration, so they knew what kind of answers I’d give, what I was willing to say, how I sounded when I was telling them the truth. Anything they already knew, I gave them. There’s another tip: don’t fucking clam up and present yourself like a challenge. It don’t matter a bit if they already know your name, where they captured you, what you were carrying, that kind of thing. Just shrug and tell them. Make it feel a little bit easy. Save your energy.

Took ‘em two days to lay a hand on me ‘cause they had to get the proper clearances. Ha! Still cracks me up every time. It was Merrick started it, I think. Big guy, big hands. First question he asked was who was in my Hydra cell, and that was no fucking question at all because as far as I knew, all of them were dead. That’s how we used to do it – six or eight of us who all knew each other, and then we’d each know two more that the others didn’t know.

What? No, kid, I don’t care to stop smoking. Yeah, I know it will but I’m retired, so who gives a shit? Stop being a whiner. Nobody likes a whiner.

Where was I?

Oh, right – the questions. Yeah, it might have started off easy but it got harder. Who’s in your cell. Thump – punch to the face. They did that for a couple of days. They’d drag me into interrogation, beat on me for a couple of hours, dump me back in my cell for a while, rinse and repeat. Left nice little breaks in between so I couldn’t predict how long I’d be left alone.

I reckon I’d been in that cell about a week before they brought in Martineau. He was the interrogation expert, the one they reserved for the tough cases. I’d seen him work before and I can tell you, I wasn’t too happy to hear his name come up. Let me describe him for you: about five nine, fairly lightweight guy. Weird, grey eyes, light blond hair and this thin, pinched little mouth like a cat’s ass. Used to wear gold-rimmed glasses, so even though he was only in his thirties, he looked like a fifty-something accountant or some shit. Gave me the creeps, even when he was on my side. He used to do this thing where he’d come in with a toolbox, set it on the table and open it up, and then just chat away. Never touched a thing – let your imagination do the work for him. Well, he knew that I knew that trick so he didn’t bother with it, just grabbed his pliers and started in on my fingernails.

That was the first week with Martineau. Fingernails, then toenails, needles and pliers. Burst one of my eardrums with a needle. Stuck ‘em down my pisshole, too. Don’t recommend that, not one bit. Still, it was bearable, just about. No worse than a gunshot wound or a knife to the bicep. Nothing I hadn’t dealt with in the field. Besides, at that point I was still pretty sure that there’d be a way out, eventually. The reality hadn’t sunk in. I was being kept in a box and eating mush, sure, but here’s the truth: humans always want to survive. We believe we’ll survive. That keeps you going for a pretty good while, just gritting your teeth through the pain. You go away someplace else in your mind, you think about _when_ you get out, _when_ you get home. I was thirty-seven years old and delusional as hell about that, naive like a child.

Second week shit got bad. Real bad. Can’t tell you a lot of it – don’t remember. I only know what injuries I ended up with. They fucked up one of my kidneys, I know that. That’s when I lost these fingers, too. Yeah, three there and one on the other hand. Put paid to firing a gun properly. They knew that. It’s why they took ‘em off my dominant hand.  Left kneecap, left foot. I got eight pins in my left foot and ankle. Sets off airport security like crazy. My right eye’s glass – did you know that? Nah, I’m not kidding – hear that? Anyway, everything else was trivial. The bruises, the broken bones, the teeth. All that stuff’s easy to fix, relatively speaking.

Legal? Kid, anything’s legal when your side makes the laws. Those fuckers had a sense of moral superiority and they liked to throw it around. Everything’s allowed if you’re doing it for _America_ , didn’t you hear? It was for the _people_. I was just collateral damage.

Damage was about it. I just snapped after a while. I panicked. Oh, you laugh, but it could easily have been you. Everybody breaks in the end. I lasted three weeks with a bunch of guys who had all my psych evals for the past fifteen years. What did it, at the very end, was Martineau coming in and reading me a list of casualties. I knew every goddamn name on it. Anders, Jones, Mercer, Murphy, Petrov, Rumlow, Westfahl... I still remember those names, all in alphabetical order like he read them. Told me they were all dead, every one. He even listed off the causes of death. After that, I told them everything. Not much, and with casualties what they were, most of that intel must have been useless to them. It must have been enough, because eventually they told me that was it, it was over, they didn’t need anything else from me. I didn’t believe them at first, but when they left me untouched in my cell for a whole day I had to believe it was true. Had nothing else to spill.

Martineau put his head round the door in the morning and said, all right, Rollins, all right Jackie boy, just coming to say goodbye. They’re planning something special for you tomorrow morning. Bright and early, crack of dawn. A special send-off.

Well, I knew what _that_ meant, so I just curled up and waited to die.

What you gotta understand here is: I had nothing. Nobody. Now I knew for sure that my STRIKE team were killed at the Potomac, I’d got no reliable connections that I knew of. I was beaten to shit, safehouses were probably all compromised and I just knew anything in my name would’ve been seized already. So even if I could get out, where the hell would I go? Couldn’t go to a friend. Couldn’t go to a hospital. Nah, I was pretty sure it was the end, right there.

Open me another beer, Lin, I’m parched with all this talking.

God, I’d have killed a man for a beer that night. You can’t imagine what it’s like. They took the bed out. They’d taken it out when Martineau arrived. He was into deprivation, shit like that. I was lying on the floor. Everything hurt, no pain relief. I’d been pissing blood for a couple of days. Blood, that was the thing. Blood everywhere. I could taste it all the time. It was dried on my skin and making me itch. I’d lost a lot and they weren’t feeding me enough to replace it. My fingers – my stumps – kept opening back up. I slept – or I passed out, anyway – I slept for a while. I drifted in and out.

Got to be approaching morning. I knew, although there was no light. They’d been regular about coming for me, same time on the dot, and you develop a clock. You tend to know when you want to be up. There was movement down the hall and I managed to get up on my feet. Felt like a fight but I got there. Wanted to be standing when they came for me. It was weird, not quite right; the noise was irregular. Lots of banging and crashing. I thought they might be moving something at first and then the door – the fucking door got caved in. One blow. There was bright light and I thought to myself fuck me, fuck me, it’s Iron Man, they’ve sent Stark in to kill me.

Then my eyes adjusted and I figured that couldn’t be it. The colour was all wrong. Dark blue or black, skull for a face. Scared the shit out of me. I couldn’t keep upright, had to lean back against the wall. Imagine me – a month of beard, missing fingers and teeth, covered in blood and stinking like sweat and piss. And then the faceplate pops up and Brock says to me: right, Jack, you coming or do I gotta stand here like a prick all day?

Me and Rumlow? Yeah, we go way back. Did we ever what, kid? Spit it out, and stop with the eyebrows, you look like you’re having a fucking stroke. Did we ever fuck? Ha! You can ask him _that_ yourself. Yeah, I call him Brock. He’s a buddy. Like I call you rookie or idiot, ‘cause you’re both, Adams.

Christ, he was like a miracle. I’d thought I was dead for sure. Thought _he_ was dead, too. Then there he is, scarred up and wearing a tin can, grumpy bastard like always. He gave me a shot of morphine and we got the hell outta dodge. The hallways were a mess, piled up with bodies. He’d blasted his way in through an exterior wall, crazy fucker. Now that’s loyalty, kids. That’s loyalty. Every law enforcement agency in the country had him on a watchlist, and he shot up the Triskelion’s cafeteria to get me out of there. That’s how you fucking treat your men. You don’t leave people behind.

Got me a few scars there, that’s for sure. Nah, this one on my chin’s much older. Got it in training, back when we actually had to fucking work, unlike you little slackers. Twenty-odd years ago now. But all that?

That’s a story for another day.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Care and Devotion](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4863656) by [Bekaylo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bekaylo/pseuds/Bekaylo)




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